Opening

Written by: Charlotte Ungar

Co-First Place Winner of the 2025 Wallace Stevens Poetry Contest 

 

Of all I forget, I remember, the almond blossom painting

in your room, naked, your limbs sprawled out—

eyeing those bending branches

 

Coiling, climbing one another to end a flower.

The blue between the stems. How Van Gogh never visited Japan

yet saw it everywhere. Delusion or projection? Kyoto

 

Or France? I remember feeling older than the trees

more touched than fleshed root veins more discontinued

than thigh scar tissue. I remember smoothing a finger

 

Down your face, knowing each nose bone.

I remember looking into black water, night gleam blurring

sky for reflection, rolling behind my eyes.

 

I remember rose and rosemary and peonies.

I remember the taxi driver on the corner of 52nd whispering,

good bye beautiful, his words grimed, stretching

 

Around fifth avenue, tough like taffy mulled in the mouth.

I remember the teeth of men who’ve loved me. Of the folding

of moments never faded. What keeps memory

 

Rogue? Are we not, scatterings of obsession? Gatherings

of paused particulars, lesions plied open at the question.

Time follows in this: our drawn ons, those walled white irises winding.

 

Tell me something true.